The History of Sound: Stories

by Ben Shattuck

The house did not sit on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic as one might imagine a Nantucket house. It did not have columns or a widow’s walk or a picket fence or a secret garden rimmed with heirloom rosebushes. It was small and stout, deep in a nest of cobblestone streets downtown, near an old cemetery, packed in a line of houses that were evacuated in the fall. If I opened my bedroom window, I could reach out and touch the weatherworn shingles of the neighbor’s house.